At around 9:00 a.m. on October 27, 2022, Parag Agrawal, the CEO of Twitter, summoned his leadership team into one of the large glass-doored conference rooms that lined the suite of offices on the seventh floor of Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. After months of tension and worry, there was a grim clarity in the air—Musk was finally completing the acquisition.
Twitter’s top-ranking employees crammed into the room. Agrawal’s deputies were there, as well as vice presidents from finance, product, human resources, and sales. Even more executives dialed in on video conference from New York and around the globe, their faces tiling the screen at the end of the room.
It was clear to everyone there that it was Agrawal’s last meeting. He sat at the conference room table, CFO Ned Segal by his side. The mood was somber—everyone in the room understood that many among them might soon be swept away by Elon Musk’s tsunami.
No one was more likely to be fired than Agrawal. For months, Musk had made clear his disdain for Twitter’s chief executive in barbed tweets, curt text messages, and explosive video calls. Agrawal had taken most of Musk’s outbursts quietly, advised by Twitter’s battalion of lawyers not to argue with the billionaire or speak about the deal to employees—or even executives—because anything he said might leak to the media.
After months of near-silence to the wider group, Agrawal spoke, remaining calm and analytical. “We might close today,” he announced. The court-imposed deadline for Musk to complete the transaction was the next day, Friday, but it seemed he could get it done a day early. Agrawal told the executives he was proud of what they’d accomplished.
There was no agenda, he told everyone, and opened the discussion. “What’s going to happen now?” one executive in attendance asked. Segal tried to explain how the closing would work but said candidly that no one could be sure. After all, the man on the other side of the transaction was unpredictable.
There was plenty of work left to do to finalize the deal, but Agrawal allowed Twitter’s leaders to riff, share, and ask anything they wanted. They had never had a meeting quite like it before. Sales executives wanted to know what they should tell advertisers. Human resources leaders wanted to know what they could tell employees, and when they were allowed to share any information.
Then one of the employees in the room broached the question that everyone was thinking but no one dared say: “What’s going to happen to you guys?”
Segal repeated the same line he’d told employees before. “I haven’t talked to him,” he said. “I’ll remain open until I do.” Agrawal nodded along.
“Each of you needs to make your own decision,” Agrawal said.
The executives had endless questions, but their leaders had few answers.
Segal could sense their frustration and, after months of facing unanswerable questions, he cracked. Fighting to keep his composure, he told them he didn’t know what was coming next. “People remember how you handle yourself when it’s hard, not when it’s easy,” he said, his voice choking with emotion. He tried to express the weight of the responsibility all of them had—to the company and to each other—to see the sale through.
Several of the executives in the room were startled to see Segal, normally polished, perky, and on message, get emotional. As the meeting ended, some of them embraced each other, while others hung back to say their goodbyes to their bosses.
Antonio Gracias, a private equity investor who was Musk’s close friend and de facto finance shepherd in the deal, had told Twitter’s team on Wednesday that he had all the money in place to close the transaction. It was a pleasant surprise to Segal, who, upon learning that Gracias had the funds, nudged the board. They should move up the close, the chief financial officer suggested. Finishing the transaction early would leave Musk one less day to back out. While Twitter’s leadership had no idea where some of Musk’s money was coming from—new, undisclosed investors had joined Musk’s take-private effort—they were more than willing to take his $44 billion.
Members of Twitter’s finance teams had adopted a gallows humor approach to the deal and made a joke of trying to track Musk’s money. When he sold new tranches of Tesla stock and filed the required public disclosures of the transactions, they tallied up his funds, trying to figure out if Musk had enough cash on hand to buy their company. At one point, Musk’s lawyers also accidentally sent Twitter’s finance team a full spreadsheet of all the people and investment firms from which they solicited money. That screwup was immediately followed by a legal threat to the Twitter recipients to delete the email and its contents.
Of course, there was no way of knowing where the billionaire kept all his money or how he planned to use it. Twitter employees debated whether Musk was sitting on a secret stash of cryptocurrency or had obtained fresh margin loans using his private SpaceX shares as collateral. The Wall Street Journal later reported that Musk borrowed $1 billion from SpaceX that October, paying the money back with interest the following month.
To Twitter, it didn’t really matter where Musk’s money came from—so long as he paid. But given how many agreements Musk had already tried to break, nothing was certain. There was a world where the richest man on earth, they believed, could test the court-appointed deadline by saying he simply did not have the available funds to do the deal.
In a normal transaction, the buyer would be transparent with the seller about where his funds were flowing from. But Musk, in what Twitter executives believed was an effort to protect his investors from scrutiny, had dumped all the funds into a single account so that Twitter couldn’t trace their origins.
On a call with Segal and Twitter’s finance executives and lawyers on Thursday, Gracias changed his tune. His boss was actually short, Gracias explained. Musk was missing more than $400 million, and Gracias demanded that Twitter wire money from its own coffers to Musk so that the deal could close. Segal was dumbfounded. Robert Kaiden, Twitter’s strait-laced chief accounting officer, and the half dozen other people who listened in to the conversation couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
